Nexus - 0401 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Panama Canal Commission, with the mark- the entry because the folder bearing his ings to show strategic spots in the Canal name happened to be second in the pile. It Zone and distances to islands and ports contained hundreds of photostats of what within a 1,000-mile radius. seemed to be military reports... Another was filled with documents relat- A suitcase opened midway in the search ing to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, one _ appeared to contain nothing but engineer- of the most "sensitive" areas in the war _ ing and scientific treatises. They bristled effort. Judging by their contents, various _ with formulae, calculations and profession- suitcases could have been labeled under the al jargon. I was about to close the case and heads of machine tools, oil refineries, blast. pass on when my eye was caught by a furnaces, steel foundries, mining, coal, con- specimen of stationery such as I had never crete, and the like. Other folders were _ before seen. stuffed with naval and shipping intelli- Its letterhead was a magic incantation: gence. There seemed to be hundreds of "The White House, Washington". As commercial catalogues and scientific mag- prospective owner of an 80-acre tract along azines... There were also sheafs of info the shore of Washington State, I was about Mexico, Argentina and Cuba. impressed by the lordly omission of the There were groups of documents which, capitals, "D.C.". Under the flashlight I on the evidence of stationery, had been _ studied this paper with attention. It was a contributed by the Departments of _ brief note, of two sheets, in a script which Agriculture, Commerce and State. All was not level but sloped upward to the such papers had been trimmed close to the right. The name to which it was addressed, text, with white margins removed. I decid- "Mikoyan", was wholly new to me. (By ed that this was done either to save weight, questioning Colonel Kotikov later, I or to remove "Secret", "Confidential" or learned that A. I. Mikoyan at the moment "Restricted" stamps that might have halted was Russia's No. 3 man, after Premier a shipment, or for both reasons... Stalin and Foreign Commissar Molotov. Then I copied the legend: "From Hiss". He was Commissar of Foreign Trade and Thad never heard of Alger Hiss, and made Soviet boss of Lend-Lease.) Using one knee as a desk, I jotted notes with a pencil on two long envelopes that happened to be in my pocket... The first thing I unearthed made me snort with disgust. It was a ponderous tome on the art of shipping four-legged ani- mals. Was this the kind of twaddle American pilots were risking their lives to carry? But in the back I found a series of tables listing railroad mileages from almost any point in the United States to any other. Neatly packed with the volume were scores of roadmaps, of the sort available at filling stations to all comers. But I made a note that they were "marked strangely". Taken together, they furnished a country- wide chart, with names and places, of American industrial plants. For example, Pittsburgh entries included "Westinghouse" and "Blaw-Knox". The next suitcase to be opened was crammed with material assembled in America by the official Soviet news organ, the Tass Telegraph Agency. A third was devoted to Russia's government-owned Amtorg Trading Corporation of New York. One yielded a collection of maps of the 82 - NEXUS — The Explosive Secrets of Major Jordan's Diaries — Continued from page 28 DECEMBER 1996 - JANUARY 1997